- What was your mindset around the time that you wrote "4-Hour Body", "4-Hour Workweek", but in particular "4-Hour Body", because the protocols in that book are so very useful. They were at the time it was published, they still are now. And so many of the things like ice baths, the discussion around brown fat thermogenesis, resistance training in its, you know, kind of basic form of just providing enough progressive overload to get an adaptation, not excessively long workouts, weight loss, slow carb diet, and on, and on, and on.

What were you thinking at that time? Like, if you can think back to then, like what were you foraging for? What were you thinking about when you woke up in the morning thinking, oh, I'm gonna go find all this stuff that at the time was really esoteric, 'cause it is all played out very well.

What I'm basically saying is if you want to know what's going to be happening hot and useful in five years, 10 years, and onwards, just look at what Tim's doing at any moment. So there it is. - Well, thank you for the very generous comparison and intro. I'm thrilled to be here, so thanks for having me.

And the "4-Hour Body" represented an opportunity for me to do a few things. The first was to diversify my identity from outside of the realm of the, say, business category. So it was a deliberate move since the success of the first book bought me permission to do something else that publishers would still want to gamble on.

I wanted to see if I could, maybe like a Michael Lewis, take my audience with me to other topics. So that was a lateral move that was very deliberate from a career optionality standpoint. And then I was doing, I think, what I've done for a very long time and what I enjoy doing, which is looking at the most prevalent beliefs and maybe dogmatic assumptions in a given field.

Could be anything. If anyone says always, never, should, I pay attention and take note of that. They may very well be right. But if anything is said in absolutes, I like to stress test. And in the case of, say, physical performance or physical manipulation, tracking, 2008, 2009 was a very interesting time because a number of different technologies were coming online, meaning being adopted by small groups.

You had the very early stages of, say, accelerometers as wearables. You had a number of different innovations and means of tracking that had never been available before. You had, for instance, and this took a bit of ferreting on my side, it wasn't immediately on the roadmap for the Firebody, but continuous glucose monitors.

At the time, that was, I want to say, exclusively limited to type one diabetics or maybe type two diabetics, but largely type one diabetics. And what captured my interest, and I can't recall how I came across it, but it was probably through the very earliest iterations of what later became the quantified self movement.

And I remember attending the very first gathering at Kevin Kelly's house in Pacifica, California. This was around 2009, 12 people, 13 people to discuss quantifying health. But the example of a professional race car driver, I can't remember the form factor, whether it was F1 or NASCAR or other, who was using this continual glucose monitor for paying attention to glucose levels while driving.

And I thought to myself, would that not be useful for healthy normals? Would that not have other applications? If this is being used by a high performer in this type of context, might it have other types of applications? Which then led me to use the very early versions of Dexcom, which were really painful to implant.

No longer the case, of course that's changed a lot. And I wanted to see how I might be able to find a handful of different categories of things. There's the new, like the genuinely new, like CGM at that point was genuinely new. The very old that might have some room for scientific investigation.

And I would say, when I say scientific, I don't necessarily mean randomized control trials at a university. I do think as an end of one, if you think about study design and you can even blind, you could even placebo control. And I knew people in the small subculture of quantified self who did this.

You can, I think, approach things in a methodical way where you can make a lot of progress in trying to determine causality or lack thereof. Looking at very old things, looking at orphaned things. So for instance, there are many examples in the world of doping, where you have say, Balco back in the day, where famously Barry Bonds and others purportedly use things like the cream and the clear.

And these were based on anabolics that were sourced from Soviet literature or older literature from the '50s and '60s that might not be on the radar of say the anti-doping groups that would administer the testing. So all of these different buckets were of interest to me. And I begin where I usually do, which is interviewing folks.

So I would interview one or two people in a given field, and I might ask them any number of questions. So one is, what are the nerds doing on the weekends or at night? This is also really good for investing. It's like, all right, what are the really technical nerds doing at night or on the weekends after they've put in a really long work day or work week?

Let's take a really close look at that. Another one is, and I'll create a flow for this, but what are rich people doing now that everyone or tens or hundreds of millions of people might be doing 10 years from now? And an example of that would be, let's just say, full-time assistant, virtual assistant, AI.

So we've seen the needs and wants being addressed by different technology, but it's an iteration of the same thing on some level, in the case of say using ChatGPT tied into Zapier for various functions. And then where are people cobbling together awkward solutions? So where are people piecing together awkward solutions, and is there room for some type of innovation there?

These are a few of the questions that I would not only ask myself, but ask experts in different areas. So if I end up spending time, say, this was a few years prior to writing The 4-Hour Body. I spent time at NASA Ames and was interacting with a number of scientists, some people who were working on all sorts of biological tests and looking at genomics.

And I had a very frank discussion about where they thought, if they had to push, right? So I'll ask questions like, push a little bit into the realm of science fiction and speculation, because I'm sure you can't support any type of projection like that with the literature, with scientific literature.

But what do you think some of the risks are of say publishing your genome? Because at the time, a number of high-profile folks had just made their full genomes available. And they're like, well, I think in the near future, it might be possible to reconstruct someone's face based on their genetic data.

And they're like, high degree of confidence, like zero to 100%, how confident? They're like, yeah, 80, 90%. I'm like, okay, I should pay attention to that. Because if you're making your data available, let's just say, and it's anonymized per se, you still might be identifiable. So it's like, okay, that raises some interesting questions.

Like, okay, well, then how might you get around that? How might you put in safeguards so that you are the one and only keeper of your data, so to speak? Brought up all sorts of targeted weaponry by sort of bioweapons possibilities that I was interested in. And then I would ask that person who's clearly willing to step outside of the box of whatever he's working on day to day, who are two of your close friends or two thinkers you really pay a lot of attention to or kind of at the bleeding edge of something and unorthodox?

And then I would just continue to have these conversations over and over again. And the stream of development that I paid a lot of attention to is something along the lines of the following. So the very beginnings are usually in some type of extreme case. And I think the extremes, and this goes for product design as well, but the extremes inform the mean, but not vice versa.

So you can actually learn a lot by studying the edge cases. So racehorses, for instance, you'll often see things start with, say, racehorses, or people with wasting diseases, for instance, or any type of chronic or terminal illness who are willing to try some more experimental interventions. Then let's just take one step further, bodybuilding.

See a lot of interesting behavior in bodybuilding and high-level athletes, then billionaires, then rich people, then the rest of us, right? So my assumption is and was for the 4-Hour Body that along the lines of William Gibson's quote, the future is already here, it's just not evenly distributed. So I'm never predicting the future, I'm just finding the seeds that are germinating that I think are gonna bloom and end up spreading really, really widely.

So that's generally where I start. And I assume the practitioners are gonna be ahead of the papers. So studying, say, the coaches whose jobs are on the line, who are getting paid based on athlete performance, and assuming that a lot of that will eventually, if it holds up, make its way into, say, the peer-reviewed exercise science papers, but it's gonna have a lag time of three to five years.

- At least. - At least. At least, it takes a long time. - Yeah, science is often very slow to catch up. You mentioned many things I have questions about. You mentioned paying attention to the new, the very old, or the orphaned. So interesting, and I just thought I'd tell you that when you sit down with a graduate student or a postdoc, and they're trying to come up with a project, rarely do you say, "What do you wanna work on?" And they fire back a really interesting question.

Sometimes they do, but that's the rare person. More often than not, you'll send them to the literature, and they'll come back with, "Okay, there's this new technique "that we can use to answer a set of questions "better than ever before," or, "There's a very old theory I wanna revisit," or, "There's this theory that no one pays attention to." In fact, we had one guest on here, Oded Rashavi, who is studying, essentially, inheritance of traits, transgenerational inheritance of traits.

It's a little bit, although, different from Lamarckian evolution, but it's a lot like that in some ways. And these orphaned theories that everyone assumed were wrong and that there is a basis for them. So I think there's real genius in that analysis. (upbeat music) (upbeat music)