How to Predict Trends in Health, Fitness & Investing | Tim Ferriss & Dr. Andrew Huberman
00:00:00.000 | - What was your mindset around the time
00:00:04.680 | that you wrote "4-Hour Body", "4-Hour Workweek",
00:00:08.720 | but in particular "4-Hour Body",
00:00:10.180 | because the protocols in that book are so very useful.
00:00:14.120 | They were at the time it was published, they still are now.
00:00:17.120 | And so many of the things like ice baths,
00:00:20.560 | the discussion around brown fat thermogenesis,
00:00:24.080 | resistance training in its, you know,
00:00:27.200 | kind of basic form of just providing enough
00:00:30.080 | progressive overload to get an adaptation,
00:00:32.040 | not excessively long workouts,
00:00:34.000 | weight loss, slow carb diet, and on, and on, and on.
00:00:38.440 | What were you thinking at that time?
00:00:40.400 | Like, if you can think back to then,
00:00:42.640 | like what were you foraging for?
00:00:45.120 | What were you thinking about when you woke up
00:00:46.440 | in the morning thinking, oh, I'm gonna go find
00:00:47.760 | all this stuff that at the time was really esoteric,
00:00:50.520 | 'cause it is all played out very well.
00:00:53.560 | What I'm basically saying is if you want to know
00:00:56.160 | what's going to be happening hot and useful
00:00:59.240 | in five years, 10 years, and onwards,
00:01:01.480 | just look at what Tim's doing at any moment.
00:01:03.960 | So there it is.
00:01:05.960 | - Well, thank you for the very generous comparison
00:01:09.360 | and intro.
00:01:10.200 | I'm thrilled to be here, so thanks for having me.
00:01:12.560 | And the "4-Hour Body" represented an opportunity
00:01:16.720 | for me to do a few things.
00:01:17.680 | The first was to diversify my identity
00:01:20.600 | from outside of the realm of the, say, business category.
00:01:24.180 | So it was a deliberate move since the success
00:01:26.440 | of the first book bought me permission
00:01:29.480 | to do something else that publishers
00:01:30.920 | would still want to gamble on.
00:01:32.840 | I wanted to see if I could, maybe like a Michael Lewis,
00:01:36.000 | take my audience with me to other topics.
00:01:38.280 | So that was a lateral move that was very deliberate
00:01:40.720 | from a career optionality standpoint.
00:01:43.680 | And then I was doing, I think, what I've done
00:01:46.320 | for a very long time and what I enjoy doing,
00:01:48.320 | which is looking at the most prevalent beliefs
00:01:54.120 | and maybe dogmatic assumptions in a given field.
00:01:56.720 | Could be anything.
00:01:58.900 | If anyone says always, never, should,
00:02:02.080 | I pay attention and take note of that.
00:02:04.400 | They may very well be right.
00:02:06.000 | But if anything is said in absolutes,
00:02:08.880 | I like to stress test.
00:02:10.680 | And in the case of, say, physical performance
00:02:13.420 | or physical manipulation, tracking,
00:02:17.040 | 2008, 2009 was a very interesting time
00:02:20.780 | because a number of different technologies
00:02:23.780 | were coming online, meaning being adopted by small groups.
00:02:28.140 | You had the very early stages of, say,
00:02:30.020 | accelerometers as wearables.
00:02:32.900 | You had a number of different innovations
00:02:35.880 | and means of tracking that had never been available before.
00:02:40.140 | You had, for instance, and this took a bit of ferreting
00:02:43.540 | on my side, it wasn't immediately on the roadmap
00:02:45.700 | for the Firebody, but continuous glucose monitors.
00:02:49.340 | At the time, that was, I want to say,
00:02:53.380 | exclusively limited to type one diabetics
00:02:55.860 | or maybe type two diabetics, but largely type one diabetics.
00:02:59.140 | And what captured my interest,
00:03:01.540 | and I can't recall how I came across it,
00:03:03.300 | but it was probably through the very earliest iterations
00:03:07.220 | of what later became the quantified self movement.
00:03:09.980 | And I remember attending the very first gathering
00:03:12.040 | at Kevin Kelly's house in Pacifica, California.
00:03:15.460 | This was around 2009, 12 people, 13 people
00:03:20.460 | to discuss quantifying health.
00:03:22.700 | But the example of a professional race car driver,
00:03:27.700 | I can't remember the form factor,
00:03:29.340 | whether it was F1 or NASCAR or other,
00:03:31.620 | who was using this continual glucose monitor
00:03:34.420 | for paying attention to glucose levels while driving.
00:03:39.420 | And I thought to myself,
00:03:42.300 | would that not be useful for healthy normals?
00:03:46.020 | Would that not have other applications?
00:03:48.060 | If this is being used by a high performer
00:03:49.700 | in this type of context,
00:03:51.300 | might it have other types of applications?
00:03:53.560 | Which then led me to use the very early versions of Dexcom,
00:03:58.260 | which were really painful to implant.
00:03:59.820 | No longer the case, of course that's changed a lot.
00:04:02.700 | And I wanted to see how I might be able to find
00:04:07.260 | a handful of different categories of things.
00:04:09.800 | There's the new, like the genuinely new,
00:04:11.980 | like CGM at that point was genuinely new.
00:04:15.060 | The very old that might have some room
00:04:20.060 | for scientific investigation.
00:04:23.060 | And I would say, when I say scientific,
00:04:24.900 | I don't necessarily mean randomized control trials
00:04:28.140 | at a university.
00:04:29.020 | I do think as an end of one,
00:04:32.060 | if you think about study design and you can even blind,
00:04:35.580 | you could even placebo control.
00:04:36.940 | And I knew people in the small subculture
00:04:39.700 | of quantified self who did this.
00:04:41.580 | You can, I think, approach things in a methodical way
00:04:45.780 | where you can make a lot of progress
00:04:47.460 | in trying to determine causality or lack thereof.
00:04:50.960 | Looking at very old things, looking at orphaned things.
00:04:53.620 | So for instance, there are many examples
00:04:57.060 | in the world of doping,
00:04:59.660 | where you have say, Balco back in the day,
00:05:03.100 | where famously Barry Bonds and others
00:05:05.940 | purportedly use things like the cream and the clear.
00:05:09.740 | And these were based on anabolics
00:05:11.340 | that were sourced from Soviet literature
00:05:15.420 | or older literature from the '50s and '60s
00:05:18.220 | that might not be on the radar of say the anti-doping groups
00:05:22.740 | that would administer the testing.
00:05:24.380 | So all of these different buckets were of interest to me.
00:05:28.600 | And I begin where I usually do, which is interviewing folks.
00:05:31.540 | So I would interview one or two people in a given field,
00:05:34.620 | and I might ask them any number of questions.
00:05:38.700 | So one is, what are the nerds doing
00:05:41.420 | on the weekends or at night?
00:05:42.500 | This is also really good for investing.
00:05:43.980 | It's like, all right, what are the really technical nerds
00:05:46.580 | doing at night or on the weekends
00:05:49.540 | after they've put in a really long work day or work week?
00:05:53.220 | Let's take a really close look at that.
00:05:55.460 | Another one is, and I'll create a flow for this,
00:05:58.940 | but what are rich people doing now
00:06:02.380 | that everyone or tens or hundreds of millions of people
00:06:06.100 | might be doing 10 years from now?
00:06:09.560 | And an example of that would be, let's just say,
00:06:11.820 | full-time assistant, virtual assistant, AI.
00:06:15.260 | So we've seen the needs and wants
00:06:19.940 | being addressed by different technology,
00:06:21.540 | but it's an iteration of the same thing on some level,
00:06:24.940 | in the case of say using ChatGPT
00:06:27.000 | tied into Zapier for various functions.
00:06:29.740 | And then where are people cobbling together
00:06:32.060 | awkward solutions?
00:06:33.340 | So where are people piecing together awkward solutions,
00:06:38.340 | and is there room for some type of innovation there?
00:06:41.420 | These are a few of the questions
00:06:42.620 | that I would not only ask myself,
00:06:44.620 | but ask experts in different areas.
00:06:46.260 | So if I end up spending time, say,
00:06:48.020 | this was a few years prior to writing The 4-Hour Body.
00:06:53.020 | I spent time at NASA Ames
00:06:55.500 | and was interacting with a number of scientists,
00:06:57.420 | some people who were working on all sorts
00:06:58.980 | of biological tests and looking at genomics.
00:07:03.260 | And I had a very frank discussion
00:07:04.820 | about where they thought, if they had to push, right?
00:07:07.900 | So I'll ask questions like,
00:07:09.260 | push a little bit into the realm
00:07:12.100 | of science fiction and speculation,
00:07:13.620 | because I'm sure you can't support
00:07:16.460 | any type of projection like that
00:07:18.100 | with the literature, with scientific literature.
00:07:20.060 | But what do you think some of the risks are
00:07:22.700 | of say publishing your genome?
00:07:24.700 | Because at the time, a number of high-profile folks
00:07:26.460 | had just made their full genomes available.
00:07:28.700 | And they're like, well, I think in the near future,
00:07:30.780 | it might be possible to reconstruct someone's face
00:07:34.820 | based on their genetic data.
00:07:37.020 | And they're like, high degree of confidence,
00:07:39.260 | like zero to 100%, how confident?
00:07:40.620 | They're like, yeah, 80, 90%.
00:07:41.940 | I'm like, okay, I should pay attention to that.
00:07:43.980 | Because if you're making your data available,
00:07:45.740 | let's just say, and it's anonymized per se,
00:07:48.220 | you still might be identifiable.
00:07:49.860 | So it's like, okay, that raises some interesting questions.
00:07:51.700 | Like, okay, well, then how might you get around that?
00:07:54.900 | How might you put in safeguards
00:07:56.740 | so that you are the one and only keeper
00:07:59.500 | of your data, so to speak?
00:08:00.940 | Brought up all sorts of targeted weaponry
00:08:05.500 | by sort of bioweapons possibilities
00:08:07.820 | that I was interested in.
00:08:08.900 | And then I would ask that person
00:08:10.540 | who's clearly willing to step outside of the box
00:08:14.460 | of whatever he's working on day to day,
00:08:16.380 | who are two of your close friends
00:08:19.140 | or two thinkers you really pay a lot of attention to
00:08:21.740 | or kind of at the bleeding edge of something and unorthodox?
00:08:24.900 | And then I would just continue
00:08:26.420 | to have these conversations over and over again.
00:08:28.380 | And the stream of development
00:08:32.420 | that I paid a lot of attention to
00:08:33.580 | is something along the lines of the following.
00:08:35.660 | So the very beginnings are usually
00:08:39.860 | in some type of extreme case.
00:08:42.060 | And I think the extremes,
00:08:44.420 | and this goes for product design as well,
00:08:45.820 | but the extremes inform the mean, but not vice versa.
00:08:48.500 | So you can actually learn a lot by studying the edge cases.
00:08:51.180 | So racehorses, for instance,
00:08:54.020 | you'll often see things start with, say, racehorses,
00:08:57.380 | or people with wasting diseases, for instance,
00:09:00.220 | or any type of chronic or terminal illness
00:09:04.020 | who are willing to try some more experimental interventions.
00:09:08.660 | Then let's just take one step further, bodybuilding.
00:09:12.140 | See a lot of interesting behavior in bodybuilding
00:09:14.500 | and high-level athletes, then billionaires,
00:09:16.220 | then rich people, then the rest of us, right?
00:09:18.500 | So my assumption is and was for the 4-Hour Body
00:09:21.860 | that along the lines of William Gibson's quote,
00:09:25.300 | the future is already here,
00:09:26.300 | it's just not evenly distributed.
00:09:28.140 | So I'm never predicting the future,
00:09:29.860 | I'm just finding the seeds that are germinating
00:09:32.740 | that I think are gonna bloom
00:09:34.340 | and end up spreading really, really widely.
00:09:38.060 | So that's generally where I start.
00:09:41.380 | And I assume the practitioners
00:09:42.540 | are gonna be ahead of the papers.
00:09:44.500 | So studying, say, the coaches whose jobs are on the line,
00:09:48.740 | who are getting paid based on athlete performance,
00:09:51.660 | and assuming that a lot of that will eventually,
00:09:54.580 | if it holds up, make its way into, say,
00:09:56.980 | the peer-reviewed exercise science papers,
00:09:59.000 | but it's gonna have a lag time of three to five years.
00:10:01.420 | - At least. - At least.
00:10:02.980 | At least, it takes a long time.
00:10:04.060 | - Yeah, science is often very slow to catch up.
00:10:07.180 | You mentioned many things I have questions about.
00:10:11.940 | You mentioned paying attention to the new,
00:10:14.780 | the very old, or the orphaned.
00:10:17.120 | So interesting, and I just thought I'd tell you
00:10:21.160 | that when you sit down with a graduate student
00:10:23.420 | or a postdoc, and they're trying to come up with a project,
00:10:26.900 | rarely do you say, "What do you wanna work on?"
00:10:29.820 | And they fire back a really interesting question.
00:10:33.360 | Sometimes they do, but that's the rare person.
00:10:36.220 | More often than not, you'll send them to the literature,
00:10:39.580 | and they'll come back with, "Okay, there's this new technique
00:10:41.640 | "that we can use to answer a set of questions
00:10:44.720 | "better than ever before,"
00:10:47.060 | or, "There's a very old theory I wanna revisit,"
00:10:49.580 | or, "There's this theory that no one pays attention to."
00:10:52.140 | In fact, we had one guest on here, Oded Rashavi,
00:10:54.220 | who is studying, essentially, inheritance of traits,
00:10:57.600 | transgenerational inheritance of traits.
00:10:59.180 | It's a little bit, although,
00:11:00.460 | different from Lamarckian evolution,
00:11:04.380 | but it's a lot like that in some ways.
00:11:07.140 | And these orphaned theories that everyone assumed were wrong
00:11:09.780 | and that there is a basis for them.
00:11:11.100 | So I think there's real genius in that analysis.
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