The Tim Ferriss Show - #267: Tools and Tips for Better Sleep

Starting point is 00:00:00 At this altitude, I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start shaking. Can I ask you a personal question? Now would have seemed the perfect time. What if I did the opposite? I'm a cybernetic organism, living tissue over metal endoskeleton. Me, Tim, Ferris, show. This episode is brought to you by AG1, the daily foundational nutritional supplement that supports whole body health. I do get asked a lot what I would take if I could only take

Starting point is 00:00:32 one supplement, and the true answer is invariably AG1. It simply covers a ton of bases. I usually drink it in the mornings and frequently take their travel packs with me on the road. So what is AG1? AG1 is a science-driven formulation of vitamins, probiotics, and whole food sourced nutrients. In a single scoop, AG1 gives you support for the brain, gut, and immune system. So take ownership of your health and try AG1 today. You will get a free one-year supply of vitamin D and five free AG1 travel packs with your first subscription purchase. So learn more, check it out. Go to drinkag1.com slash Tim. That's drinkag1, the number one, drinkag1.com slash Tim. Last time, drinkag1.com slash Tim. Check it out. This episode is brought to you by Five Bullet

Starting point is 00:01:21 Friday, my very own email newsletter. It's become one of the most popular email newsletters in the world with millions of subscribers. And it's super, super simple. It does not clog up your inbox. Every Friday, I send out five bullet points, super short of the coolest things I've found that week, which sometimes includes apps, books, documentaries, supplements, gadgets, new self experimentsexperiments, hacks, tricks, and all sorts of weird stuff that I dig up from around the world. You guys, podcast listeners and book readers, have asked me for something short and action-packed for a very long time. Because after all, the podcast, the books, they can be quite long. And that's why I created Five Bullet Friday.

Starting point is 00:01:59 It's become one of my favorite things I do every week. It's free. It's always going to be free. And you can learn more at Tim.blog forward slash Friday. That's Tim.blog forward slash Friday. I get asked a lot how I meet guests for the podcast, some of the most amazing people I've ever interacted with. And little known fact, I've met probably 25% of them because they first subscribed to Five Bullet Friday. So you'll be in good company. It's a lot of fun. Five bullet Friday is only available if you subscribe via email. I do not publish the content on the blog or anywhere else. Also, if I'm doing small in-person meetups, offering early access to startups, beta testing, special deals, or anything else that's very

Starting point is 00:02:40 limited, I share it first with five bullet Friday subscribers. So check it out, tim.blog forward slash Friday. If you listen to this podcast, it's very likely that you'd dig it a lot. And you can, of course, easily subscribe any time. So easy peasy. Again, that's tim.blog forward slash Friday. And thanks for checking it out. If the spirit moves you. Hello, boys and girls, ladies and germs. If the spirit moves you. you can apply. Now, after more than 250 conversations or close to 300 episodes now, you and I start to spot patterns and themes across every possible domain. A lot of the people who are the best at what they do, regardless of where it is, tend to do a lot of the same things or focus on the same things. So this episode contains some of the best lessons I've learned about sleep, recovery, and regeneration,

Starting point is 00:03:45 where I have really applied my focus more than almost any other foundational pillar in my life. Why? Because if you get sleep and recovery right, it magnifies everything else incredibly, to a much greater extent than say even diet or exercise, I find. So getting sleep and recovery right is critically important. The recommendations that we'll cover include people like strength coach Charles Poliquin, who's trained athletes from 20 different plus sports, including Olympic gold medalists, NFL all pro players, Stanley Cup champions, and much more. I don't do the four hour work week, but I like to do the four-and-a-half-hour work day. It also includes tips from Amelia Boone.

Starting point is 00:04:31 She has been called the Michael Jordan of obstacle course racing and is the most decorated athlete in what they call OCR. Maybe I can become a fat-adapted athlete because for longer races, I didn't want to have to rely on gels and poos and stuff like that because after a while it can it can be too much in your stomach. I then talked to comedian Mike Birbiglia who has a very particular nighttime ritual that has helped him learn how to sleep after many many problems. The biggest thing is is getting off of social media getting off of Twitter and Facebook. And Dr. Peter Attia, one of my favorite docs on the planet, shares his best lessons and takeaways related to rest. At the time, I literally said to my wife, like, I'm going to go get a gastric bypass.

Starting point is 00:05:16 And she was like, you are the most ridiculous human being let's get started. And I will kick it off with a few points of my own. I have been a lifelong insomniac, specifically with onset insomnia. So certain people have trouble getting to sleep. I'm in that camp or had been for many, many decades. Other people have trouble staying asleep. I'm not in that camp, but a lot of the recommendations will apply. And there are a few things in the last 12 months, in particular, that I have reapplied and re-evaluated and continue to recommend. There are a few things right off the bat. Number one, a white noise machine of some type, like a MarPak Dome, M-A-R-P-A-C-D-O-H-M device,

Starting point is 00:06:06 which some hotels at the higher end have started to include in rooms specifically because they help sleep so much in my experience. Then cooling. Temperature is probably the single most important variable in sleep conditions and certainly sleep onset. For me, that means as cold as I can tolerate, often around 65 degrees Fahrenheit. Then if we want to look at the downstream effects on mental health or stability of sleep timing, I recently had a conversation with Ray Dalio, who is the founder of the largest hedge fund in the world, Bridgewater Associates. They manage about $160 billion in assets. And he shared with me how his son, who suffers from bipolar disorder, or I should say manic depression, could be labeled any number of ways, much like yours truly,

Starting point is 00:06:58 has found that his symptoms are mitigated tremendously by going to bed by 11 p.m. I can corroborate this. As a lifelong night owl, my stability tends to be much more under control, much more even keel when I go to bed by 11 p.m. And there are a few things that also assist across the board in my experience. And again, not a doctor, don't play one on the internet, but something called N-acetylcysteine, N-A-C is how it's often abbreviated, and lithium orotate in very, very, very low doses. So we're talking about five milligrams here, I found to be extremely helpful foric sleep, which means fragmenting your sleep into shorter periods with interspersed rest. There are many different formats, the most infamous of which is probably the Uber to function. And if you miss one of your naps, woe unto thee, because you are going to have at least two days of complete zombie state. So it is not for people with significant others or social obligations or ambitions of any type, generally speaking. But Matt Mullenweg, for instance, who is the CEO of Automatic

Starting point is 00:08:23 and is thought of as the lead developer of WordPress, which now powers something like 27, 28% of the entire internet, did the vast majority of his coding in what he would call his most productive year while following polyphasic sleep. I tend to do very well with monophasic sleep, which is normal, what you think of as normal. So eight hour block of sleep, say from whatever it is, midnight to 8am. However, I have found I function best across the board, physically and mentally, if I get around 7.5 hours, I know it's very specific, seven and a half hours of sleep at night, and then another one and a half hours. So 90 minutes, which is one ultradian rhythm around three or 4 PM whenever possible. And that reinvigorates me to such an extent. The 90 minutes is very important. 60 does not do it for me, nor does 30. So 90 minutes will

Starting point is 00:09:18 allow me to put in, if I so desire an entire additional equivalent of a work shift, like seven or eight hours without fatigue. It's pretty phenomenal. So let's then move on to more tips on sleep and restfulness from other folks that I hope you find extremely valuable, or at least as valuable as I have. Charles Poliquin. Let's start with Charles. Charles, at Strength Sensei on Twitter, has a wealth of knowledge related to training, nutrition, and supplementation. The guy is an encyclopedia. He has authored more than 600 articles and written eight books, including what I believe is his latest, a very short gem entitled Arm Size and Strength, The Ultimate Guide. You should check out Charles and his arms, I kid you not. NHL guys ended up listening to him

Starting point is 00:10:06 because they saw what he looked like in person. When Charles and I had our conversation, I asked him which supplements he uses for improving sleep. And I should also update this by noting that I, in the last few weeks, have been experimenting with something that he produces called the yin reserve which includes several different components that he alludes to in this conversation question comes from daniel matthews kazimir chuck difficult irish name which supplements do you currently use for improving sleep? Personally, I'm a big fan of magnesium threonate. I take six capsules at bedtime mixed with two grams of theanine, T-H-A-N-I-N-E. I will post a page to where to get these ingredients on the website. The next question comes from Marcus Beamer. There are many things you might regret, but what's the thing that comes to mind most often?

Starting point is 00:11:08 Well, what would I change if I could do it again? I wish the four-hour week would have been published when I started my career. People tell me often, you are very lucky. I got very lucky by working 20 hours a day for years on end. So when you work that many hours and that doesn't include the training. So for years, for about eight months out of the year, I would only sleep three hours a night.

Starting point is 00:11:38 I would say that's my biggest mistake. I said yes too often. And I should have been concerned more with the quality of the athletes I trained. The problem was that when I would get hired, I would get the whole national team. Once I established credibility, being consistent with results, when I would negotiate with national team, I would tell national team, these are the guys I'll pick, these are the guys I will train. So it would have saved me time on writing programs, illustrating programs, monitoring programs, teaching technique, but you need to have a reputation before.

Starting point is 00:12:12 So I spent a lot of time doing that. What I've learned over the last few years is that you get known that the jobs you turn down, not the jobs you accept. A month ago, Ellen Maroulis won the gold in Olympic wrestling for women first time in America did so for weeks I've been asked to do seminars write books take on more national team athletes train foreign teams and I said no to all one of these requests why because Emery gear not I don't do the four-hour work week,

Starting point is 00:12:46 but I like to do the four-and-a-half-hour work day. And one thing I do regularly is I take a week off a month to rest, to read, and I take three months vacation a year. Probably having a child was probably the best thing for me to learn other prioritized things so i really started to cut back on the amount of work uh once my daughter but the biggest mistake i've ever done was to work far too much now you got guys like guy vaynerchuk will say you need to hustle you do but you should still favor quality over quantity and if you want to understand the concept better, I strongly suggest you read The One Thing and to read The 4-Hour Workweek. It's just a mental outlook to what you do. The next question is from Jonathan Anderson.

Starting point is 00:13:37 Thanks to Charles, I'm now big into omega-3s to keep me out of immunomission. Dr. Barry Sears says, 3-2-1 EPA to DHA. I'm taking that ratio at a greater expense. Is it worth it? Should everyone go on it? Well, Dr. Gagnon, unfortunately, passed away a few years ago, was probably one of the smartest guys on that topic. What we know is that it's actually better to vary the types of fish oil.

Starting point is 00:14:04 There's an axiom you should respect, is that the more you're dealing with inflammation, the higher the EPA ratio to DHA should be. So a lot of brands will sell you a 6 to 1 ratio, and that will bring down inflammation better than the 3 to 1 ratio, actually. If you're concerned with brain, so let's say if you have ADD, ADHD, borderline personality, all the studies on brain disorders show that a high DHA, omega-3

Starting point is 00:14:35 product is better. So usually you want an 8 DHA to EPA, to 1 EPA ratio. But there's no magical official. And the other thing we know a lot from research, it's better to take products like Omega-3 Avail from Designs for Health, whereas also mixed in D3, sorry, K1 and K2 into the product because those actually increase absorption. You don't need as much large quantity and of course you supplement this important fat soluble vitamins the next

Starting point is 00:15:11 question is from Roddy Lee and he asked me you're not a big fan of foam rolling isn't foam rolling a massage thing my beef against foam rolling is that it would be trying to build a bridge one pebble at a time. It takes far too long. So there's such a thing as a principle of training economy. I mean, Tim is big on that, whether you eat a four-hour body or any of his books. It's like you have to have maximum return at least amount of time. So people waste tremendous amount of time foam rolling. The amount of time they waste on foam rolling could be, trying to get flexible,

Starting point is 00:15:54 could be done in a good 20-minute active release session or roughing technique or the Voila method. There's a lot of stuff out there that exists to get rid of adhesions and improve range of motion. And let's say if you have a good active release practitioner and you're foam rolling because you have a tight shoulder, if the guy does a good job, and let's say you're the worst case scenario, you're about as flexible as a crowbar within five treatments you'll have 100% range of motion and if you're complete certified idiot you will still maintain those gains for six weeks so that's six months i'm sorry so in my opinion to go see a very good

Starting point is 00:16:40 soft tissue practitioner and invest the time and money into that will save you all these countless hours of foam rolling because you will have the results and it'll be more permanent if you see a soft tissue therapist. The next question is from Morgan Brown. If you only had to pick one important factor between sleep, food, and exercise? Which would you pick and or how would you prioritize them? Well, Morgan, that's like asking me for optimal health, should I prioritize my liver or my heart or my brain or my adrenals or my kidney? All of those are important. If you don't have a brain, well, forget it. If you don't have a heart, forget it. If you don't have a liver, you're not going to live very long. So you can't prioritize so much. Let's say if we look at prisoners at Club Fed, they can sleep as much as they want. Is this sleep restful? Probably not because maybe your roommate wants to kill you. it's not the greatest but they do have plenty of opportunity to exercise and they have weight

Starting point is 00:17:45 rooms so in that case you could argue people can get a good physique and if you look at the book of jl strong by josh bryant some pretty good physiques were built behind bars but then again you say to the guys we'll make you safe and then we'll give you paleo foods all these guys will grow a lot i'm not sure taxpayers would agree with that thing but you can't prioritize them you can't say i'm just going to sleep to muscle growth i'm just going to exercise to muscle growth i'm just going to eat to muscle growth you need all three next up is amelia bo, who you can find on Instagram, arboone11, A-R-B-O-O-N-E 11, or I think she's just Amelia Boone on Twitter. Amelia has more than 50 podium finishes in obstacle course racing and is widely considered the most decorated in the sport. And I'll give

Starting point is 00:18:44 you just a few examples of her finishes. In the 2012 World's Toughest Mudder competition, which lasts 24 hours, she finished second overall out of 1,000 plus competitors. Keep in mind that those competitors are probably 80%, 90% male. All right, so second overall. This was ahead of every single competitor except for one male who ended up winning the whole thing, and he beat her by a mere eight minutes. She won the 2004 World's Toughest Mudder eight weeks after knee surgery.

Starting point is 00:19:14 She's a beast in the best way possible. Amelia is also a three-time finisher of the so-called Death Race, which, not surprisingly, has been discontinued. The name tells you all you need to know and she dabbles in ultra running in her spare time she's also a full-time attorney at apple by the way and as someone who pushes her body to the limits she's learned the importance of rest and how to make the most of it what what does your nutrition look like uh and no we were were you serious earlier when i asked you about breakfast

Starting point is 00:19:50 all right what was your answer we were doing a sound check and i asked her what she had for breakfast what was your answer pop tarts pop tarts um no that's actually so pop tarts has become kind of this like running joke um in the obstacle racing community with me because when I won the Spartan race world championships in 2013, I was so far ahead. I was like 20, 30 minutes ahead of the next woman. And the race director yells out at me, he goes, Millie, what'd you have for breakfast this morning? And I'm like, pop tarts.

Starting point is 00:20:20 And I actually did randomly that day. Cause they're a really good source of easy easy milly digestible carbs milly is it what is that what you said or did you say your full name sorry i heard sorry said amelia okay got it sometimes i can't say my own name um and uh so it kind of became this thing that like i would just like pre-race ritual um that would be like a good luck thing to like have a pop tart. Cause I'm a soup.

Starting point is 00:20:47 I'm a really big person into superstition and, um, it's kind of grown from there. And now I see, like I was at, I was at a race the other weekend and like everyone around me was eating pop tarts. And I'm like, what have I started? Like what? And then everyone like post these pictures on Instagram of them eating Pop-Tarts. And they tag me in it. And I'm like, oh, my God, I've created a monster.

Starting point is 00:21:14 Well, this actually could be an incredible opportunity for you to do whatever you want. Because I remember watching Pumping Iron and Arnold Schwarzenegger was talking about the guys who come up to him and ask him for advice. And he gives them the wrong advices. And he would like tell them to go into the shower at the gym and like scream while they're posing. So you could, you could actually,

Starting point is 00:21:33 you could pull an incredible April fool's joke, but announce it a year later after everyone has already embraced it. I know. So now I'm like, okay, well what's the next thing? Like what's the, you know,

Starting point is 00:21:43 what other superstitions do you have? Um, not limited to racing necessarily. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Uh, I'm one of those people that, so it's the same, like I will wear the same sports bra. Like, so we raised pretty much like sports bra and like compression shorts.

Starting point is 00:22:00 Cause you want as little clothing to like hold down the mud as possible. So I'll wear the same, you know, if I did the mud as possible. So I'll wear the same, you know, if I did well in a race, like I'll wear the same outfit for like the next race. Um, and especially the same headband. Um, and then if I don't do well, then that one gets discarded, you know? And so it's, it's that kind of like your typical, um, sports stuff. Um, I actually have, this is kind of embarrassing, but a small little stuffed dog that travels with me to all races. And, um, because I'm typically by myself in really cheap, sketchy hotels, um, because these races are like in the middle of nowhere. Um, so it's like my little guard dog. How big is the stuffed dog? Oh, it's like fits in the palm of your hand where did you get that

Starting point is 00:22:46 it was given to me as a gift as a protection as a guardian as a guard dog um so yeah i mean it's it's just it's it's silly um it's silly stuff like that um you, outside of pop tarts. Yeah. What do I actually eat? Yeah. What is, what is your, let's just say you're four weeks out from a race. Yeah. What is your, what does a day of food look like for you? Oh, that's hard to say. Uh, honestly, like I, it's, it's one of those things I've struggled with that I've, I've tried every, like I tried to do paleo. I tried to be like, maybe I can become a fat adapted athlete because for longer races, I didn't want to have to like rely on gels and stuff like that because after a while it can, it can be too much in your stomach. But I just never, I'm never going to be the paradigm of good eating of like, and, and, um, I couldn't, couldn't stick with like, you know, um, the whole,

Starting point is 00:23:48 like, you know, trying to, I couldn't go far enough into like the fat adaptation. Like it was just miserable. Um, I like ice cream way too much. Um, it's somewhat chondro indicated for ketosis and fat adaption. Much to my chagrin. At a certain point, I think I realized I'm performing well. I'm winning races. So if it gets to the point where I'm not doing well, then I'll take another look at my diet and switch it. But at this point, it's like I run so much. I put in so much time that I'm like, whatever.

Starting point is 00:24:26 I enjoy food and I'll eat kind of whatever I want. If we were to look at, say, the world's toughest mudder, what do your routines look like? You said you're a creature of habit, as am I. The hours before the competition, let's just say, like the day of, what are your routines? So I always get up like super early before, well, I get up super early in general every morning. What's super early? So my alarm typically goes off like right around 4 a.m. That's why you didn't flinch when we were talking about Jocko Willink, the SEAL commander.

Starting point is 00:25:05 I'm like, and he wakes up at, the seal commander. I'm like, and he wakes up at four zero response. I'm like, Oh, another one. Here we are. Yeah. 4. Um,

Starting point is 00:25:14 and, so actually on race days, it's almost like I sleep in a little bit. But when do, when do the races start? Typically, um, they generally will start world's toughest

Starting point is 00:25:26 mud is a little bit different that one starts at two in the afternoon now but um like just a regular obstacle horse race would generally be like 7 30 is the i got it so that starts at 2 p.m so let's use that example you wake up at four oh yeah then i drive myself crazy for the next however many hours twiddling my thumbs what what other type of body prep or mental prep do you do? Yeah, I generally use the distraction technique. So I try to not think about really, because I can sit there and make myself miserable over and over, like picturing the race or whatever. But I find it helpful actually.

Starting point is 00:26:05 I actually do a lot of work in the mornings before races. over and over, like, like picturing the race or whatever, but I find it helpful. Actually. Um, I actually do a lot of work in the mornings before races. Um, so I'll catch up on emails. Um, I'll do things from like my attorney life. Um, and, um, then in terms of like body prep, I, you know, I do a lot of like foam rolling, mobility, things like that. Um, the older I get, the more I realized, like, I can't just like jump out of bed in the morning and like, you know, be spry as a chicken. So you're 32. Is that right? 32, 32, 32. I would imagine you still have a couple of good years left in you, but the mobility work that you do, what does that actually look like in detail? So I generally carry like an arsenal of every single, like from a golf ball, a lacrosse ball, a softball, a foam roller.

Starting point is 00:26:58 And so I'm really focused on loosening up hips, loosening up hamstrings. And every single different little torture device has, you know, it's the golf ball is for the foot. Um, the lacrosse ball works well on the glutes, you know, the softball is great for the hamstrings. Um, so I'm just, you know, getting the muscles kind of warmed up and loosened and prepped. Um, and, um, I do, I actually, from a lot of various nagging injuries that I've always had, I have like little physical therapy routines that I always do too, you know, like to get your glutes activated and things like that. What type of movements do you do

Starting point is 00:27:38 for glute activation? Oh, there's this fantastic exercise called Jane Fonda's that if anybody's ever been in these for like glute meat or oh yeah glute meat where you're sitting there and you're like man i should really have leg warmers on right now so you're talking about is this like the bent leg sort of uh the reverse thigh master pretty much yeah it's the reverse thigh master on your side yeah yeah and like variation like doing fire hydrants like that too, you know, like a dog lifting his legs. There's all super sexy things that people like, like if you, if you do them in a gym, people are like, Oh God, there's that girl. I tell you, I think that you probably

Starting point is 00:28:17 get more attention doing fire hydrants than I do. At least unless I'm in a gym in the Castro, which it might be a similar experience. And do you use any other modalities for prep? Do you use any STEM? Do you use anything like that pre-race or is that set aside for other, other purposes? Pre-race? Not so much. No, that's more like recovery, like recovery,

Starting point is 00:28:40 all like compression boots and, um, stem. Now our compression boots, the compression socks, are these actual boots, the boots that inflate, you know, and like the air pressure chambers that, um, you know, like kind of like flush out supposedly flush out lactic acid. So, um, that's, and that's post-race. That would be post-race. Yeah. So let's talk about post-race then. So in terms of facilitating recovery, so you finished the race and is it true that you have not slept for days on an after races or is that an exaggeration? No, it is true.

Starting point is 00:29:19 So any long race that I've done, like world's toughest motor is a 24 hour race. Um, I've done other races that are longer, 48 that are 60 hours. Um, and I feel like it's, I can't sleep afterwards and you feel like you should be able to, you're like, wow, I was just up for three days straight, um, running around in the woods, but my mind, your body is so physically exhausted, but my mind is still on so much like on overdrive that I just can't. So, I mean, for instance, this year after World's Toughest Mudder, there was a group of us staying at a house, sat around, we're drinking beers, watching a football game. And I was like, man, I should really be getting drunk right now or something like that like I'm drinking and I've been running around in a wetsuit all night long. I'm like, I don't feel anything like I don't feel any effects of the booze or anything like that. I was like, it just must be this adrenaline still pumping through me.

Starting point is 00:30:16 Did other people have the same similar experience or is that unique to you? I think no, because everyone else just kind of passed out and went to bed. So I was like, Hey guys, let's say, okay, everyone's asleep right now. And when, when you cross the finish line, uh, as such, you're done. What type of recovery starts? What are the, what are the actions that you take in the hours following the race? So I think one of the most important things that people should do that they don't is you have to stay moving. People want to finish a race and especially a long one. Um, and just like lay on a couch or go to sleep. It is the worst thing you can do because you're going to wake up and

Starting point is 00:30:59 like not be able to move anything. So I generally try and stay walking. I try and stay active. Um, you know, I will hop again on like a foam roller or something like that and try, you don't want to be too aggressive afterwards. Like you're not going to like hop on a softball and roll out your glutes because like, that's going to hurt really bad. Um, but then just, just try and stay active. And that is in the next day, too. Gentle movement and things like that. Are you a proponent of ice, ice baths, anything like that? Or not?

Starting point is 00:31:35 If I can't... I mean, I'm not a scientist. Whatever. All I know is what works for me. People have different opinions. If I can get into an ice bath, I will, but it needs to be like immediately. So there have been races where there's like a lake right next to me. And I'm like, if it's cold enough, then I'll just go jump in the lake and kind of use that as an ice bath. But if you're waiting like four or five

Starting point is 00:31:59 hours, I don't really think it's going to end up helping you in the end. And, uh, I want you to correct me if I'm wrong. 2012 world's toughest mutter. How did you place? Uh, I won for females, but I was second overall in 2012. Second place overall. Yeah. How did that feel? So it was a really interesting race. Um many competitors this was again there were about 1200 people i believe is is generally every year um so they're about 1200 people uh it was once this one they moved just to november so it was supposedly a tiny bit warmer but actually it wasn't it was actually colder in 2012 than it was in 2011 um and uh i guess I didn't realize I knew I was winning for women. And at this point we were about 24 hours or getting close to the end. And I was about 80 some odd miles in. And, uh,

Starting point is 00:32:57 as on the last lap, they're like, okay, well you've won for women, but the guy that's winning is like nine minutes ahead of you. So we're on this last lap, um, you know, going, we'll end up with 90 miles and there are all these people from Tough Mudder headquarters and like all these matters just like yelling at me, willing me to go on because all they want me to do is to win overall, you know? And you're so tired at that point and like so kind of delirious that I guess I didn't even realize like the import of that situation of like how massive that would have been. Um, cause I was just like, leave me alone. I hurt. I'm tired. I'm freezing. Like I'm covered in like 10 like millimeters of neoprene. Like I'm just, you know, and I'm like,

Starting point is 00:33:47 I get it. I'm trying to move faster. My body won't let me. Um, but yeah, so I ended up finishing about nine minutes behind the male overall winner. Um, and, uh, yeah, so it was pretty, it didn't really hit me until like a day or two later where I was like, Oh, I was that close. Oh, okay. Mike Birbiglia at Birbigs, B-I-R-B-I-G-S on Twitter, say hi, is one of my favorite comedians, certainly one of the best known and busiest comedians in the world, both behind and in front of the camera. His standup blends elements of theater, film, storytelling, and comedy. The guy just seems unstoppable. He's been very deliberate in studying a lot of crafts and tying them together, which I find fascinating. It's reflected in a lot of his successes. So sold out tours as a solo act, New York Times bestselling

Starting point is 00:34:39 books, off Broadway shows, feature film, TV, the whole nine. I asked Mike about his nighttime rituals, and he, in fact, is famous for very, very severe sleepwalking disorders. I find the Fitbit was helpful for me. Because it tracks my sleep, and so it tells me this thing about my sleep, which I had to how much you were walking the night before. No, it's true. It's true. I mean, it tells me not only tell, I don't know if you know about this. It not only tells you, um, you know, how you, you know, how long you slept, but it tells you the quality of sleep during,

Starting point is 00:35:21 you know, in other words, like it tells you, you know, you slept technically for eight hours, but you, you know, you were awake for an hour of that. So it's actually quite helpful. I like it. And so you use it primarily for your sleep then? For my sleep. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I like the steps thing. I like trying to get to 10,000 steps a day. That's helpful. But for the sleep, I mean, cause you got to remember, like I I've, I've slept over at hospitals, you know, countless times for sleep, I mean, cause you got to remember, like I I've, I've slept over at hospitals, you know, countless times for sleep studies. Cause I have REM behavior disorder and it's like $3,000 per visit to any, obviously, you know, some of it's insurance, but some of it I have to pay. And it, I mean, this thing basically does a sleep study and it costs a hundred bucks.

Starting point is 00:36:09 What, uh, what's, what type of nighttime rituals do you have? I mean, you mentioned easing in instead of crashing into the wall. Yeah. Uh, do you, do you have any particular kind of wind down or evening rituals? I try to do there. There's a, actually a good podcast called, uh, not to be mistaken with sleepwalk with me. There's a good podcast called uh not to be mistaken with sleepwalk with me there's a good podcast called sleep with me i could go a lot of directions okay yes and it's this guy named i think he calls himself scooter and he sounds trustworthy and slow and circling back to the first topic and then the next topic and then another thing and then a digression and the next thing you know you're asleep. I mean, it's pretty fascinating what he does.

Starting point is 00:37:03 I'll have to try that. Yeah, so that's where looking into. And then, um, and then I try to write in my journal and then I, honestly, the biggest thing is, is, is getting off of social media. It's, you know, getting, getting off of Twitter and Facebook. I think, you know, in relationship to what we were talking about earlier of like, I was saying the thing about Oliver Stone, that he he joined the army and became that's how he became self-reliant and how ultimately, like everything in your life that you do leads to who you are and what you're able to accomplish. I think that social media is weirdly the exception to that. I think that social media is like this weird kind of looking in the mirror all the time thing that is, it's not helpful for being productive or learning. I don't know if that's true, but that's been my feeling lately. I think the dose makes the poison.

Starting point is 00:38:05 Certainly. I mean, I think there's, there's a point where you're like, Oh, this Tylenol is helping my headache. And then, Oh, I, my stomach lining just fell out of my ass. No, I mean that, that hasn't actually literally happened to me, but there's, there's definitely a point where, you point where things in excess become their opposite. What is the, on the flip side, the first kind of 60 to 120 minutes of your day look like? I mean, are there any particular rituals that you have in the morning? It's a little bit like memento every day. Injecting your wife with insulin over and over again.

Starting point is 00:38:50 It's just like a lot of times if I'm not focused, I will kind of wander. And, you know, until I have coffee, forget about it, I'm a heavy coffee drinker. And, um, and if I'm on a pro basically, if I'm on a project, if I'm shooting a movie, I have a complete and exact plan for the next day. And if I'm writing a movie, like I said, I put notes next to my bed, your mic, wake up, go, go to the coffee shop and write. Um, I think that when I don't have a routine, I'm a mess and I'm not productive and it's not, it's not helpful. Um, so that, so that's what I'd say. It's, it's inconsistent.

Starting point is 00:39:31 And the other thing is I travel. I mean, what would the thank God for jokes show? I toured a hundred cities in a year. And so it's, it's very hard to have rituals when you're going to a hundred cities in a year. Yeah, I wonder if it makes the value of the rituals even greater if you are able to maintain some semblance of routine when touring. I don't know. I've never done that. Do you have a favorite venue in the entire United States?

Starting point is 00:40:01 If you had to pick one? Oh, gosh. there's so many. I mean, the upright citizens brigade theater in New York city, it feels like home. Cause I've been on that stage a lot. And the comedy cellar in New York feels similarly. Um, I think that in terms of like a pound for pound venue, I think the Chicago theater is probably your best concert venue in America. Chicago theater seats about 3000 people. And yet as a performer, you feel like you're talking to people in your living room. And as an audience member, it feels like you're just, you know, you're just, you're just watching, you know, someone not in your living room, but sort of, you know, in, it feels intimate.

Starting point is 00:40:41 So you are, you're a collector of good advice. What is the worst advice that you hear or see being given out often? And that could be in any domain. It could be comedy, could be writing, could be movies, could be completely unrelated, anything. It's all about, you know, it's all about getting your dream, pursuing your dream. Like, I feel like there's something. I don't know what the exact advice is that drives me crazy, but I think there's a cultural thing right now that is kind of irksome, which is that people feel like they're like, I read it recently in the New York times or someone said, um, I'm forgetting her name who wrote this, but she said, if I had advice for college students, it would be don't ask, what do I want to be when I grow up? Ask, how can I help? Or how can I

Starting point is 00:41:40 change the world? Or how can I make be of service to other people? And I think that the, the kind of like, just kind of be whatever you want to be is, is perhaps to be reconsidered by how can I be of service when I'm on the earth for such a short amount of time. Okay. So way back in episode 50, seems like a hundred years ago or yesterday, depending on my frame of mind, I introduced you to Dr. Peter Attia, who on Twitter is at Peter Attia, A-T-T-I-A-M-D. So at Peter Attia MD on the Twitter. Peter is an ultra endurance athlete. He would say former, I was never an athlete, but he swam 25 mile plus races. So I would consider him an endurance athlete. He's a compulsive self-experimenter, which is part of why we get along so well. And one of the most fascinating human beings I know. If you want to hear a hilarious story, by the way, look up Peter

Starting point is 00:42:42 Atiyah jet fuel Ferris, and you can listen to an audio snippet of the first time that he consumed experimental synthetic ketones in his kitchen. It is a hilarious story. Anyway, Peter earned his MD from Stanford University and holds a Bachelor's of Science in Mechanical Engineering and Applied Mathematics from Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario, Canada. He resided at Johns Hopkins Hospital as a general surgeon, then conducted research at the National Cancer Institute under Dr. Steve Rosenberg, where Peter focused on the role of regulatory T-cells in cancer regression and other immune-based therapies for cancer. Given his expertise in nearly all things health, I asked Peter to explain some of what he's most excited about as it relates to recovery.

Starting point is 00:43:40 It's possible to try to optimize health to the point where it's in your best interest to just kind of sit in the metal box and absolve yourself of interacting with anything in life. And I think that you maximize your performance at the same time. So what are some of your obsessions in that realm at the moment or interests? Well, growing up, Timmy and I grew up in Canada. And so obviously hockey was sort of the most important sport for any good Well, growing up, Tim, you know, I grew up in Canada. And so obviously hockey was sort of the most important sport for any good Canadian kid growing up. But actually pretty early on around the age of 13, my interest actually shifted towards boxing and martial arts. And that became really the focus of my life. And, you know, I never really did it in moderation. So even in

Starting point is 00:44:22 high school, I was sort of training six hours a day, very, very hard, even though in amateur boxing, it's only three rounds. I was always thinking about, you know, the next step, which was being a professional. And of course, at the time, that's, you know, 12 rounds of boxing. So everything I did was geared towards, you know, I had to run 10 to 15 miles in the morning, not just four. I had to jump rope for 30 minutes, not just 15 and had to spend this many hours sparring each day. And so my, my foray into the understood or the, you know, my care about the body's performance always came through the lens of performance, right? So it was, how does, you know, what I, how does, how does the way I train or how does the way I eat impact my performance initially in a boxing ring?

Starting point is 00:45:05 Now, at the time, it was highly crude, right? In fact, I suffered from the issue that I'm sure a lot of 14-year-old boys suffered from, which we'd all kill to have that problem again, which is I actually couldn't gain weight, right? I mean, I was, you know, I started my career at 127 pounds. By the time I was 16, I was a solid middleweight, which is 160 pounds. But as you may know from your experience, most people live 10 pounds above their weight class and then come down to it. But I was only 4% body fat. So I actually lived and fought at about 158 pounds. And to keep that weight on, I would eat about 6,000 to 7,000 calories a day. Just to give you an example of lunch, right, because it was the one meal I can really remember.

Starting point is 00:45:49 It was an entire loaf of bread, which is 14 pieces of bread. So that was seven sandwiches with a two-liter jug of orange juice. And then at the cafeteria, I would buy a plate of French fries and like some other nastiness. And like that was lunch every day in high school and yet I had a 27-inch waist and no fat on me, in part not just because I was exercising six hours a day. I think more importantly because we're very metabolically different when we're 14-year-old boys than when we're 40-ically different when we're 14 year old boys than when we're 40 year old boys. Um, so if you fast forward, uh, I don't know how many years, um, you know, athletic stuff has always been important to me. The sport has shifted, you know, um, it went, you know,

Starting point is 00:46:36 by the time I was in my early twenties, the obsession switched away from, um, boxing into other things. And, and, um, more recently in my thirt my 30s, the obsession became swimming, ultra, ultra long distance swimming. How long is ultra long distance swimming? Yeah, it's kind of a fuzzy definition. I think most people define ultra long as anything over 16 miles. But I think that's somewhat arbitrary. It's sort of like one of those things like, you know it when you see it, right? Like, hey, is this one mile? Yeah, exactly. Right. is this one mile river? Yeah, exactly, right?

Starting point is 00:47:08 Is this one mile swim across the river ultra long? Not really. Is that 25-mile swim long? Yeah, that's ultra long. What's the longest swim that you've done? About 25 miles. That is a long swim. So in my 30s when – and this is now a different chapter in my life, obviously I'm not in high school. I'm, you know, I think it's time I'm working at McKinsey and company in San

Starting point is 00:47:30 Francisco. Um, I'm still managing to spend an average of four hours, three to four hours every day swimming. Um, because you, it's not linear. Like I spend, you know, eight hours a day on the weekends. Um, and then maybe only an hour and a half to two hours a day, Monday through Friday. But I'm obviously, you know, burning a lot of matches. And yet, interestingly, my weight is getting higher and higher and higher. And I went from sort of being, you know, 170 pounds to 205 pounds. And the composition of that weight wasn't, you know, wasn't what I wanted, right? It wasn't like I was gaining all this muscle. I mean, I was getting fat. And the blood tests showed that I was

Starting point is 00:48:12 basically pre-diabetic. So all of a sudden, the dietary strategy- What were the indicators that you looked at? You do something called an oral glucose tolerance test, which is they draw your blood and then you drink this horrible, nasty drink of glucose. And then they measure your insulin and glucose levels an hour later and then again two hours later. Coupled with other standard blood tests like your triglycerides and something called a hemoglobin A1C, which measures the amount of blood sugar that's basically sticking to your red blood cells. Is it fair to say hemoglobin A1C is sort of a running three-month average of your fasting glucose or is that completely scientifically un-

Starting point is 00:48:51 No, it's actually pretty close. It's not fasting. It's a three-month. It's basically a three-month running average of your aggregate glucose level. Aggregate glucose. Got it. Yeah. Okay.

Starting point is 00:48:59 Cool. Not the issue. Yeah. So anyway, basically all of these tests were pointing in the wrong direction. I had something called metabolic syndrome. And again, I think there's a lot of people that find themselves in that situation. To your question about what's the personal motivation, I think what pissed me off was – and I remember saying this to my wife. I said, you know what pisses me off is I'm working too hard to be in this situation,

Starting point is 00:49:25 right? Like it's one thing if you're sitting on the couch eating Doritos all day long, but my diet was actually much cleaner as a 35-year-old than that French fry sandwich eating kid in high school. Obviously, it still wasn't the right diet, but the point is I was busting my ass to be fit and healthy and watch what I eat. And, you know, frankly, I just got aggravated beyond words. And, you know, I mean, I, we joke about it now, but at the time, I literally said to my wife, like, I'm going to go get a gastric bypass. And she was like, you are the most ridiculous human being that's ever lived. I mean, we're going to literally have to talk about our marriage if that's what you're considering at the weight of 205 pounds.

Starting point is 00:50:07 I actually did go and see the top bariatrician in the city of San Diego. And it's kind of a weird story because even though I was like obviously overweight, I was the thinnest person in the waiting room by a long shot, right? And it sort of put in perspective like, Peter, you think you've got problems. I mean, these people each weigh 400 pounds. And when I went up, when it was my turn to go and see the doctor, the nurse took me up to the scale and weighed me. And like we got on the scale and I'm like 210. And she's like, oh, this is fantastic. Like, are you here for follow up? And I'm like, no, I'm here for – and so it was just – it was a real eye-opening experience, Tim, because frankly, throughout my entire medical training, which was in surgery and then again in surgical oncology, which is cancer surgery, I had never paid attention to this

Starting point is 00:50:58 problem. Never. If it didn't have to do with cancer, if it didn't anything to do with hepatobiliary surgery, I didn't care. And so, you know, orthorexia is used as a derogatory term, but I think you're very meticulous in your own testing, and perhaps even separate from NUSI, but you've introduced me to quite a few interesting tools or concepts. For instance, the idea of synthetic ketones. And maybe you could just comment on that as a taster for people, although taste might not be the way to put it. You can explain that. But this was an eye-opener for me. And I remember hanging out with you having dinner not too long ago where you specced out the chemical structure of, I guess it was beta-hydroxybutyrate and a number of other ketone. I guess it would be salts, right? No, they're actually salts or esters.

Starting point is 00:51:59 Or esters, right? Oh, yeah. But what are synthetic ketones and why might people care about them? Well, I think to explain it, I probably have to spend a minute explaining what ketones are biologically or what we call endogenous ketones. So if you think back to what our ancestors were doing up until a few hundred years ago or certainly a few thousand years ago, we were basically often going 24 hours or longer without food. Um, and that was just the nature of how things worked. Right. And when you're in the hunter gatherer, uh, uh, mindset that that's your life. Now, um, the, the human body is only really evolved to store a finite amount of

Starting point is 00:52:36 glucose. Um, and there's only two places we store glucose. One is in the liver, one is in the muscles. Um, and it's only that stash in the liver that's accessible by the brain because the glucose that gets stored in the muscle can't leave the muscle. It circulates within the muscle. So we have this organ in the brain which, you know, weighs maybe 2% of our overall body weight but probably accounts for 20% of our body's metabolic demand. And on top of that, it ordinarily functions exclusively on glucose. And so you have this problem, which is you have an organism that is wildly dependent on glucose, and we can only store a fraction of what we need. We can only store about one day's worth. About 400 grams, like 1600 calories?

Starting point is 00:53:20 It really depends on the size of the person, but yeah, that's probably about right for average. And remember, most of that, by the yeah, that's probably about right for average. And remember, most of that, by the way, is not accessible to the whole body. So the trick that we evolved was rather than make glucose out of protein, which is a pretty easy thing to do, the problem with that is if you want to make glucose out of protein, you have to break down muscle. And the last thing you want to do when you're out there trying to find your next meal is lose muscle at the expense of getting glucose for your brain. So what if there was a way we could get the brain to use fat, right? That's the problem that needed to be solved. And the solution was a beautiful one, right? Which is we can break down fat of which even the leanest hunter-gatherer had days and days, if not months, of fat on their body. What if you could break that fat down in the liver into another type of

Starting point is 00:54:11 molecule distinct from glucose that the brain specifically could actually utilize as fuel? And that's where ketones enter. And so what our bodies do when prolonged fasting occurs, and by prolonged, I really mean it even begins at 24 hours of fasting is we start breaking down our own sources of fat. We start making this thing you referred to, beta-hydroxybutyrate, not to get too geeky on it, but beta-hydroxybutyrate and another member of that family called acetoacetate. They exist in an equilibrium. And these things get shuttled into the Krebs cycle, which I think your readers will be familiar with. And it basically becomes another substrate for making ATP. And so all of

Starting point is 00:54:51 a sudden, and George Cahill, who is sort of a luminary in this field, passed away a few years ago. But George Cahill is one of the sort of the leading godfathers in metabolism at Harvard University. He did some legendary experiments in the 50s and 60s where they had subjects that they would starve for 7 to 14 days and just measure glucose levels and ketone levels. And you'd think that after 14 days of not eating, a person would be mentally foggy, not well. And it turned out it was just the opposite, right? After a couple day lull, and you know this personally, Tim, because you've done these long fasts, after a couple days of hell, it's actually the reverse, right? You sort of get sharp. Yeah, you feel unbelievable. And what Cahill showed was, you know, what fraction of the brain's

Starting point is 00:55:34 energy was coming from those ketones. So, okay, so that's relevant. That's starving. But look, outside of the odd, you know, let's do a one week a year fast sort of thing, how does that play into something beyond that? Well, the other way you can achieve ketosis, though not to the same extreme, is through something called nutritional ketosis, which is restricting the one dietary component primarily that restricts ketone formation and keeping at a minimum the other one that also restricts it. And those are carbohydrates and proteins respectively. And so if you eat a diet that has very little carbohydrate in it and only a modest amount of protein and the rest of it, of course, made up from fat, you can also generate ketones. Now, to your question, it turns out that you can drink or consume in some fashion,

Starting point is 00:56:24 but they're all typically liquid. You can drink these ketone molecules directly. And that's what we call these exogenous or supplemental ketones. And they come in multiple different forms. They basically exist as a beta-hydroxybutyrate ester, a beta-hydroxybutyrate salt, and an acetoacetate diester. And I've tried all of these things and I can safely say- Tell people. Why don't you recount your first experience consuming- Yes. So the first one I tried was the beta-hydroxybutyrate ester, which a very good

Starting point is 00:56:57 friend of mine sent me. And I had been told these things taste horrible that I had talked to two people who had consumed the vor and these are stoic dudes. Like these aren't, you know, this isn't like a six year old kid, right? This is like stoic military dudes who said, Oh man, that's the worst tasting stuff on earth. And, and so I knew that, but I think that piece of information was sort of like fleeting in the excitement when the box came. And so i tear open the box and also there was a note in there that explained a somewhat palatable cocktail that you could like you know mix that like how you could mix this with 10 other things and i just disregarded that and i just took out like the 50 milliliter flask and i chugged it. And I remember it was like

Starting point is 00:57:46 six in the morning because my wife was still sleeping. And, you know, all these thoughts go through your mind. So first of all, you drink it and it tasted like, like how I imagine jet fuel or diesel would taste. You know, if you've ever smelled distillate, it's this horrible odor and you can sort of imagine what it would taste like. This is what it tasted like. And so my first thought was, God damn, like what if I go blind? Like what if there's like methanol in here? Like what did I just do? And then my next thought was just, oh my God, you're gagging. I mean, you're really gagging. And now if you puke this stuff up, you're going to have to like lick up your puke and this stuff. I mean, it's just going to be a disaster, right? And so I'm like retching and gagging and like trying not to wake up the family and trying not to like spew my ketone esters all over the kitchen. And it took like 20 minutes for

Starting point is 00:58:39 me to get out and do my bike ride, which was the whole purpose of that experiment. Must have been a record setter. Oh, God. It was. Those things are unbearable. Well, there you have it, kiddos. I hope you found these tips as helpful as I did and that your sleep benefits from them. If there are other topics, other themes you'd like me to piece together by going back into all of my episodes and trying to find specific patterns, please let me know

Starting point is 00:59:11 on Twitter at T Ferris. That is Twitter. I don't know why I'm doing that this episode, but I like it. Twitter.com forward slash T Ferris, T F E R R-R-R-I-S-S. Or you can leave comments on the blog post associated with this podcast. You can find show notes for this one and every other podcast I've done at Tim.blog forward slash podcast. And until next time, as always, thank you for listening. And good night. as always, thank you for listening. And oyasuminasai. 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

Starting point is 00:59:59 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 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 favorite articles that I've read and that

Starting point is 01:00:27 I've shared with my close friends, for instance. And it's very short. It's just a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend. So if you want to receive that, check it out. Just go to 4hourworkweek.com. That's 4hourworkweek.com all spelled out and just drop in your email and you will get the very next one. And if you sign up, I hope you enjoy it. This episode is brought to you by movement watches and that is spelled M V M T movement watches. I first became aware of this company back in 2014 when they were brand brand, brand new baby company because they won first place in Shopify's build a business competition. The founders are two college dropouts who wanted to wear fancy watches, but had one wee little problem. They couldn't afford

Starting point is 01:01:16 fancy watches. So they decided to scratch their own itch. Since then, their high quality, affordable watches have gone from startup to more than 1 million watches sold across 160 countries. It's an awesome success story. And when you check out the product, you'll know why. They offer classic design, quality construction, and many different modern styles. So you can really pick one that suits you. You might want to start one. I would suggest, probably appeal to a lot of folks out there's the classic black silver. So search

Starting point is 01:01:46 classic black silver. The guys at movement have a great offer for listeners of this podcast. They're offering 15% off your entire purchase with free shipping and free returns. If you're dissatisfied for any reason, and they are very, very famous for their customer support. Just visit movementwatches.com forward slash Tim. That's M-V-M-T watches.com forward slash Tim. This episode is brought to you by soothe.com, the largest on-demand massage service in the world. Now, I've been broken so many times. I've had so many injuries from sports. I have body work done at least once a week. So I have a very, very high bar for this kind of stuff, a very, very high quality control. massages and I was blown away. I cannot tell you how surprised I was and continue to be impressed by how high the level of massage therapist and body worker is through soothe. They deliver hand-selected licensed and experienced massage therapist to you in the comfort of your own home,

Starting point is 01:03:00 hotel, or office in as little as an hour. I've used them in San Francisco. I've used them in Austin. I've used them in New York. I've used them all over. And you can, again, think of it as Uber for massages. It is available in 50 cities worldwide. The process is super simple. You choose the kind of massage you want, say Swedish or sport or deep tissue. You can even opt for couples massage. Then you set the length, the gender, and you request. Next thing you know, Soothe shows up where you want them with everything you need. They bring the massage table, sheets, oil, even music. So you don't have to worry about it.

Starting point is 01:03:33 You can unwind and chill. Soothe is in 50 cities, including most major U.S. cities in London, Sydney, Melbourne, Toronto, Vancouver, and more on the way. So step number one, download Soothe. That's S-O-O-T-H-E in the iOS App Store or Google Play Store and use code TIM, T-I-M, to get $20 off of each of your first two massages that you book. So download Soothe, S-O-O-T-H-E, and then use code TIM.

Pet Camera - EBO Air 2

The Tim Ferriss Show - #267: Tools and Tips for Better Sleep

There aren't comments yet for this episode. Click on any sentence in the transcript to leave a comment.

Your Ad Here

Pet Camera - EBO Air 2

The Tim Ferriss Show - #267: Tools and Tips for Better Sleep

There aren't comments yet for this episode. Click on any sentence in the transcript to leave a comment.